You don't have to go school anymore to get an education. Home
schooling programs exist all over the country and have been
growing in numbers and popularity for many years. Alternative
high schools have also been around for decades and offer a
minimum amount of class time combined with work experience and
dance and musical experimentation. Some parents even take their
kids out of school for a year or more just to travel the world
and learn by seeing how other cultures live and survive.
Learning in the workplace is now a hodgepodge of seminars and
workshops, classroom training, coaching and mentoring,
tele-classes, e-learning, and the latest wave of distance and
web-based learning. It's getting harder to find traditional
training programs outside of the formal education system and
even there school districts across the country are engaged in
testing and refining a variety of new and non-traditional
learning methods.
Distance learning is one way of this new type of thinking and
learning that has really gained a foothold, particularly at the
college and university level. Millions of Americans are now
engaged in their first or second attempt to get that long sought
goal, a college degree through distance learning. Almost every
university and college now offers some form of online degree
granting program and some even have graduate studies that at
least partially can be taken through distance learning.
It's easy to understand the growth of this type of training as
it parallels the growth of the personal computer and the World
Wide Web. All that was missing was a technological connection
between the users and the academic institutions and the
emergence of relatively cheap and really fast Internet access
was the key that unlocked the door.
Non-traditional learning methods like distance learning have
forced administrators and legislators to react quickly to meet
this growing demand. For students of all ages it has meant many
more options are open to them and it allows them to easily
overcome the barriers of time, money and distance that have held
them back for so many years from the degree and the accompanying
accreditation that will open new doors for their careers and
their futures.
Distance learning, like so many other non-traditional ways of
learning, were developed and expanded to knock down the virtual
walls that surround some of our academic practices. For many
people it can't happen fast enough and they welcome the changes
to date and are looking for more innovations in the future.